Idea: Some debates may have plateaued due to people not understanding statistical concepts. Policy makers will need to incorporate this insight into their decision making so that resources aren’t wasted and the resolution to social problems can still progress.
In the UK, there have been a number of cases of police officers committing sex-based crimes. One that emerged recently reminded me of an idea I had while thinking about the killing of black men by US policeman. Mainstream discussions about these topics almost never consider base rates so they’re inherently unproductive.
Poor use of base rates is so common it’s been elevated to a cognitive bias, the base rate fallacy. Using the examples above, what is the rate of sex-based crimes in the general population? Is it higher or lower in the police? Or, if you control for the number of police interactions between ethnicities in the US is the rate of killing different? In this post, I’m not interested in discussing individual cases which will have their own merits. I’ll just highlight three points: how little base rates are incorporated into our discussions, that some debates may have plateaued due to people not understanding base rates and other statistical concepts, and what this means for solving social problems.
As a scientist, I’m used to considering base rates, but it can be difficult to dismiss your intuition using statistics. In fact, I've given the feeling this generates a name, data jà vu. This is the weird contradictory feeling you often get as a scientist when your intuition says one thing but your data is telling you something else. You have to overcome this feeling, though. There are formal, reliable ways to analyse data which can prevent you from being fooled by your intuition. In many debates, though, statistical concepts like base rates aren’t even mentioned. It’s as if they don’t exist.
I think debates about some social problems have effectively plateaued due to people relying on their intuition rather than statistics. I don’t know what the base rate of criminality is in the general population versus the police. Do you? If neither of us know, then the debate about how to reduce criminality in the police is effectively over for us. I accept this, and know if I want a serious opinion I’ll have to improve my knowledge. However, what I see other people do is rely on their intuitions and just settle on an explanation and solution that fits some world view, often involving a belief there are structural problems related to people’s identities.
As I say, I don’t know what the rates of criminality are in the population versus police, but for the sake of argument let’s say the base rate is the same. This would rule out any structural problems, but that doesn’t mean you have to accept criminality in the police. You just need to find the real explanation and an associated solution. I’ll illustrate by speculating what might drive criminality in the police.
The majority of criminal violence is committed by men, but only a tiny percentage of men commit these crimes. Many of these men will be psychopaths. That is, they will have a discrete and stable personality type that can be recognised. Psychopathy is an interesting topic that I’ll leave for another post, but it’s heritable (ie, has some inherited biological component), can be promoted by childhood trauma, and will reveal itself throughout someone’s behaviour. In other words, psychopaths and their lives are atypical, and they can be identified. Crucially, psychopathic men exist throughout society. It seems reasonable then the police should just assume some of their officers will be psychopaths and have measures in place to identify them. You’d imagine of all organisations the police should be able to do this, no?
What if, then, criminality in the police is more to do with the base rate of psychopathy in the population than, for example, structural problems within the culture of the police? And, what if there are people that have neither the time, motivation, or intelligence to understand why it’s the former and not the latter? Are we just going to accept some debates will go round in circles forever because of these people?
As I've said before, when science reaches a certain level of understanding it sets the standard for what’s considered acceptable to discuss or not. In relation to this post, I’m suggesting we will reach a point, and we may already be there, where policy makers understand some people can’t productively contribute to certain debates because their understanding isn’t progressing beyond a certain point. Governments will have to be open about this problem so their policies aren’t influenced by erroneous political pressure. Otherwise, progress on social problems may stagnate.